By Ken Croswell For the first time, astronomers have watched the spiraling dance performed by two stars merging into a single star. The observations, taken between 2001 and 2008, suggest a solution to the vexed problem of how rare “red novae” form.Most novae are blue and occur when material on a white dwarf star explodes. But what causes red novae has been a mystery.The best-known red nova was spotted in January 2002 toward the edge of our Galaxy’s disk....
Colette Dziadul struggled for years to understand her daughter’s joint problems. Dana, who is now 14 years old, complained from toddlerhood that her knees and ankles hurt. The aches kept her up at night, made her wake her parents to ask for painkillers and forced her to sit out school sports. Nevertheless, two pediatricians and an orthopedist diagnosed the problem as “growing pains” that would fade as she grew older....
His finalist year: 1972 His finalist project: A study of the plant diversity on the hills outside of Los Angeles What led to the project: From an early age, plants fascinated Jonathan Gershenzon, who grew up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and ’60s. In particular, the young naturalist was drawn to their scents. In high school, encouraged by one of his science teachers, he checked books out of the library on plant ecology and then hiked up into the hills outside Los Angeles to study the chaparral (dense drought-resistant shrubs and dwarf trees that cover the region, and play a key role in area wildfires)....
An international governing body has adopted a new definition of atomic mass (aka atomic weight) changing from specific values to intervals of masses to resolve 15 years of debate on one of the most fundamental of scientific concepts. In a list that only singer-comedian Tom Lehrer could love, hydrogen, lithium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, sulfur, chlorine and thallium now all have new mass definitions. “Back in high school, you opened your chemistry book and saw a table of standard atomic weights....
Liftoff for NASA’s first-ever asteroid-sampling mission is just three weeks away. The agency’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is scheduled to launch atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Sept. 8 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. If all goes according to plan, the probe will return a pristine sample of the potentially hazardous space rock Bennu to Earth in September 2023. “We seek samples that date back to the very dawn of our solar system,” OSIRIS-REx principal investigator Dante Lauretta, a professor of planetary science and cosmochemistry at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, said during a news conference today (Aug....
APRIL 1957 GRAFTED TISSUE–“We discovered that the power to react against homografts could be prevented from developing if we injected an animal at a very early age with cells from the donor strain–most conveniently cells of the spleen. In adult mice the injection of such cells ?increases the mouse’s resistance to a graft from the donor. But if the spleen cells are injected in a mouse in the fetal stage or very shortly after its birth, the opposite happens: the mouse becomes tolerant of grafts from the strain that provided the spleen cells, though it remains intolerant of homografts from mice of other strains....
If you live to 100, as roughly one in every 10,000 people do, you will likely want both your mind and body intact. Researchers have now discovered a gene that accomplishes just that, apparently protecting the brain as well as prolonging life. The Longevity Genes Project, initiated by Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, investigates people who live exceptionally long lives....
When Alan Wolf challenged his engineering students to get artistic earlier this year, he wasn’t sure what to expect. As disciples of math and science, these students were used to knowing what the outcome should be for any given project. What would happen when he equipped them cameras and set them loose on the streets of New York City? Wolf, physics chair and acting dean of The Cooper Union’s Albert Nerken School of Engineering in Manhattan, offered his inaugural “Scientific Photography” class in January primarily as a means to encourage budding Cooper Union engineers to tackle complex technical projects....
This column is not about Newt Gingrich. Nor is it about Chaz Bono. It’s not even about how the thought of them dancing together would make Rick Santorum’s head explode. No, this column is about a psychiatrist named Keith Ablow, who in recent months has taken the time to write about Gingrich and Bono from his unique perspective as a mental health professional. According to his Web site, Ablow “serves as the FOX NEWS expert on psychiatry....
The pandemic has shown us that it’s time to change the way we get health care and that essential health care, including abortion, has always been out of reach for far too many. As we look ahead to the future of care, the science is clear: medication abortion care is safe and effective, and it’s past time to remove the restrictions on it. Now, actions from the FDA and new research show us that removing the restrictions on medication abortion care has the potential to expand access for many people who need care....
Dear EarthTalk: Are as many cats and dogs being euthanized these days as back in the 1970s and 1980s when indiscriminate breeding led to explosions in pet populations?—Mary H., Knoxville, Tenn. The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the leading non-profit devoted to animal welfare, reports that in the 1970s American shelters euthanized between 12 and 20 million cats and dogs every year at a time when there were 67 million pets in U....
Web-savvy scientists gathered at the Science Online London conference in London on 22 August to explore how the Internet is changing the communication, practice and culture of science. Biochemist Cameron Neylon, of the University of Southampton, UK, was one of a few scientists at the conference who have been given pre-release access to Google Wave – an online collaboration and communication tool announced with great fanfare on 27 May. Nature spoke to Neylon about how Google Wave could transform the way that scientists work....
Do you get excited and energized by the possibility of learning something new and complex? Do you get turned on by nuance? Do you get really stimulated by new ideas and imaginative scenarios? If so, you may have an influx of dopamine in your synapses, but not where we traditionally think of this neurotransmitter flowing. In general, the potential for growth from disorder has been encoded deeply into our DNA. We didn’t only evolve the capacity to regulate our defensive and destructive impulses, but we also evolved the capacity to make sense of the unknown....
The arrival of the new year will take a bit longer this winter. The reason: bringing the calendar back into synchronization with the earth’s rotation requires the addition of an extra second. Leap seconds are not new: 22 have been added since 1972, on June 30 or December 31. But under proposals to be discussed at a November meeting of the radiocommunication sector of the International Telecommunication Union–the United Nations agency in charge of broadcasting official time–this leap second might be the last....
The smallest exoplanet yet found to contain water is about the size of Neptune — and a rare glimpse at its atmosphere reveals clear conditions. The handful of other small planets whose atmospheres have been studied all have cloudy skies. “It’s the smallest planet that we’ve seen anything in the atmosphere besides clouds,” says Jonathan Fraine, an astronomer at the University of Maryland in College Park. “The fact that it’s clear at all is significant....
When you’re tired, it can seem as if everything is filtered through a negative lens. That might be because your positive lens is fuzzy when you are sleep-deprived, according to findings of two related studies published last year in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. Two groups of college students completed a series of tests to assess their emotional responses to negative and positive pictures, similar to those often shown on the nightly news....
This month, Finland’s Olkiluoto 3 nuclear reactor was supposed to begin generating power, a tangible sign of the revival of the nuclear industry outside of Asia after nearly 30 years of no new construction because of accidents, cost-overruns and other issues. Instead, the reactor won’t be completed for more than three more years, its price is nearly 60 percent more than anticipated, and it is mired in costly legal squabbles between the builder, Areva, and the Finnish utility, Pohjolan Voima....
The U.S. Department of Energy believes those numbers can grow a lot more, projecting that wind turbines could supply as much as 35 percent of U.S. electricity by 2050. That is the conclusion of a new report released Thursday by the DOE. “Wind Vision: A New Era for Wind Power in the United States,” draws a roadmap for how carbon-free wind power can become one of America’s leading sources of energy as the country looks for ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to combat climate change....
North Korea holds a Tree Planting Day every March. The question is whether it helps regreen a largely denuded nation whose people face food shortages, deadly natural disasters and bitterly cold winters. The public holiday began in 1946 when North Korea was under direct Soviet rule. Today, the state-sanctioned media still pays tribute to its claims of leafy success, sometimes with the participation of the “respected Supreme Leader.” Even as new trees take root, subsistence logging and deforestation have an untold impact on the country’s soil quality and its ability to feed its people....
Reprinted with permission from SFARI.org, an editorially independent division of the Simons Foundation. (Find original story here.) Boredom, tiredness, hunger and stress can all set off a yawn. People can even ‘catch’ a bout of yawning when they see or hear another person in the throes of the involuntary gesture, a phenomenon known as social yawning. Researchers speculate that this shared behavior is a form of empathy that strengthens the bonds of a group: One drowsy person’s yawn that triggers others to do the same could lead to a unanimous call for bedtime, for example....
